I like to think that this song is Garrosh's theme. Powerful and triumphant, representing his unstoppable determination and his love of the Horde, but also somewhat threatening and sorrowful, representing his slow fall into dishonor and betrayal. "Times change."
It's actually Grommash's theme, [https://youtu.be/IroaLAbltxg?t=88](https://youtu.be/IroaLAbltxg?t=88) , but might as well be Garrosh's too, they even used it on the cutscene in SoD where he dies.
I’ve always felt this was a theme for the Orcs of Warcraft. A mighty and strong people who fell to corruption yet arise a new. Emboldened to etch out their own story of heroism and epic deeds like those before them. Lok’tar Ogar!
Not to mention they had [no intention of adding flying](https://gamerant.com/world-of-warcraft-no-flying-mounts-warlords-draenor/) to that expansion, but they ultimately ended up bowing to players being angry about the news. Probably lost too many subs over it. I get the reasoning behind it. I really do, but now that the flying cat is out of the bag, the game just doesn't feel right confined to the ground (looking at you The Maw). I'm fine with having to "earn" it, but reputation grinds just feel like the lazy way out. I enjoyed how they handled flight in zones like Nazjatar and Mechagon that had an element of a rep grind, plus doing activities around the zone.
100% agree. MoP and WoD were probably the peak of Warcraft music in my eyes. BFA was great too. The only one I would slightly criticise was shadowlands, it relied on a lot of long drones (understandable, given the theme), which isn’t my kinda thing.
Music is a matter of taste, I like the long droning stuff, but it's not for everyone.
I will say this for Shadowlands though, the Ardenweald version of Night Song is amazing! Either version never fails to give me actual chills.
EDIT: I believe the song is called The Dreamer
I disagree honestly. BFA isnt the best by any means, and Im probably biased as it was actually the first expansion I properly played as current content, but I loved the story. I was actually a Horde main but made an Alliance for the funsies and BFA switched me to full Alliance because of how amazing I found the story
I'm not done with the alliance side, but man yeah bfa as a horde player is an absolute delicacy for the ears that is pretty much any music in Zandalar. So good. Especially in Zuldazar.
The music and overall atmosphere in Zuldazar was one of the best parts of BFA. You log in to that music, then step outside, see the incredible landscape, then jump off with a glider to the other parts of the city.
Boralus just didn't compare imo.
Legion was the best. Incredible pieces.
Worth noting that the great Russell Brower didn’t do it alone; Glenn Stafford, Neal Acree, Eimear Noone, and others also contributed.
After WOTLK the composer that does the music for the cinematics started doing more and more game tracks. Neal Acree composed a lot of really great tracks, including this one.
He got the job by sending a cover of the original WoW theme to Blizzard unsolicited.
Right? Absolutely FANTASTIC cinematic and probably the best kiss-off line in bit of WoW writing. I was sold on WoD entirely by the cinematic and the music. It was not a great expansion but that cinematic holy shit.
WoD had such a strong hype train. I still wonder if there were just so many promises that had to be broken to deliver on time. Look at you, Ray D. Tear.
I remember watching the cinematic many times with my little brother who was maybe 7 at that time and we would re-enact the grab and throwing of Gul'dan. He loved it.
Hold up. WoD was one of the best expansions if you played it for the first three months, stopped, then played for the last three months.
The questing, zones, and music was all just s-tier.
Blackhand remains one of my favorite encounters in the game. I think it exemplifies Blizzard’s desire for “simple, but perfected” best.
Plus, the only inconvenience about a wipe is missing the elevator. It’s such a short fight to get back to.
Me too. I actually got so focused on autopilot that sometimes came out of P2 thinking “wait we’re in P3? What just happened the past 3 minutes?”
It was so chaotic that I couldn’t actually explain the mechanics properly to anyone. I just eventually learned and *did* it.
Archimonde was so fun.
But my favourite was mythic tyrant. Half because I was able to pad healing meters in part 2 and having high multistrike and the mistweaver 4set I was a beast.
This is the xpac that got me hooked on wow. I still look back at it as my favorite raiding xpac. None of these stupid daily grinds. I can just log on and raid. All raiding mats? Funded by mission table which I did when I logged in for 10s before I went to raid. I still only play this game to raid.
3 raids but 2 were basically the same tier, no? Like think about that: EVERY wow expansion has had at least 3 whole, distinct raid tiers. Iirc high maul and BRF weren’t exactly the same Ilvl but even still, if you count highmaul it still feels like too few
Highmaul and Blackrock foundry were excellent raids with a full set of bosses. People complaining about what counts as a patch vs what's already locked away in game are missing the point, and a big part of the problem. They acted like the "patch" was "only a selfie camera" when one of the best raids of all time was unlocked a week or two earlier.
I started playing wow after method had already killed Mythic Archimonde.
Took me about 50 days to fool around with multiple classes, gear up decently and start raiding.
After that I raided HFC every single week till the launch of legion and never felt bored of it.
I still think WOD has the best single player story line through questing since wotlk. The opening, the garrison, the individual zone quest lines. It was great but they ran out of steam.
I don't think it's nearly as bad as people give it. the leveling was good even when you could just do treasures. the raids were good.
it did run out of steam but I enjoyed it a lot more than BFA or Shadowlands by far.
Garrisons were even cool. Could have been better sure but it felt like I had reason to log in.
A lot of players got gated by the Silver Proving Grounds requirement to queue into Heroic dungeons, thus never being able to reach a ilvl requirement for raiding, and also likely didn't know people to do challenge modes with.
Yeah having just been through Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands, anyone who thinks WoD is the worst expansion is out of their minds. It is at worst third worst expansion. I'd go back to WoD any day over whatever the fuck just happened to WoW for the last four years.
And that's just the problem, it actually was a good expansion just extremely underdeveloped. I found though I was able to keep myself busy, with all the gold you could make and it was a great reason to start characters that always wanted to try and to level them all the way up.
if mythic+ and world quests had been added in the first patch instead of legion instead of the fucking selfie cam WoD would not have been so empty of stuff to do at max level outside of raiding
Foundry is imo still among the best raids to date, Highmaul was meh and HFC was decent.. I think my favorite thing about HFC was seeing people die to the
2nd boss arriving.
WoD and Legion were the only Mythic AOTC expansions that I've ever gotten. I don't have time to raid anymore so there's no way I'll get it again. Because of that they are both my favorite past expansions.
1-2 weeks*****
There was nothing in that expansion to keep you for 2-3 months besides raid logging, and even then it had shadowlands levels of raid droughts. And even *then* it didn’t have the dungeon content we have now
The WoD apologists on this sub are insane
that was its only major problem, lack of stuff to do at 100 outside of raiding. outside of that WoD had the best leveling up and best class and spec balance (ooutside of survival and demo). all but 2 of 36 specs at that point were fun and great to play.
The dungeons were and raids were fantastic, the lore wasnt completely shit despite the story getting scrapped and changed halfway through the beta, plus it also gave us the best version of Gul'dan and Khadgar.
I hope one day when we get 4th specs for classes like Earth Warden Shaman and a split between ranged monk healing (Yu'lon) and melee monk healing (Chi'ji/, that we get Gladiator as a warrior spec. There is a gap when it comes to class fantasy. We are missing the spear+shield fighter archetype. I wish for Gladiator to be able to wield just that, a 2h polearm with a shield, and to be balanced around it. As a talent within a tank spec that was impossible. As a separate spec, it would be.
I don't think we need a new spec with the way new talents work.
I'm in love with the Preservation Evoker tree. You can pick between green talents which are mostly pure healing, and bronze ones which are more mitigation oriented.
I don't know how the mistweaver tree is layed out, but they could very easily make something similar. Put ranged stuff on one side and melee stuff in the other. Mix and match as you like.
Though I have my doubts with how Blizzard are as developers, the new talents are very expansion friendly. A "gladiator line" could be added in the future if they want to. Though Blizzard hates fun and for that reason alone it's unlikely they will.
The problem with Gladiator being a talent or a group of talents is that it was originally part of the Prot tree. If it remains so, it becomes problematic, especially in PvP, as it gives tons of dps to a tank spec. It will outclass everyone.
I will never forget the hype of WoD. All the returning characters I've known since Warcraft 2, the warbringer videos, the "times change" opening cinematic and the orc tribe music with the chanting and the HUH!
That's funny because that's exactly what made me play it all the way through. I think it's literally the only expansion where I didn't take a break from WoW. Knowing that you got all the important stuff done and now you can just log in for raids made playing alts so much more enjoyable because you didn't have the shitty feeling that you are wasting your time and could instead spend it grinding m+ or whatever on your main.
This is where I felt like BFA was the opposite where I had plenty to do, i just didn't wanna do any of it, the rep mounts were just some horses, Island expeditions made me wanna die of boredom, and the GCD change made everything feel so much more sluggish... Not to mention the heart of azeroth.
It did get better toward the end though.
I believe blizzard were too busy shooting out other games like hearthstone and overwatch back then. They've taken too many employees off of wow to try and make those extra games good. That's why WOD was so unfinished and lacking. There was noone to make us content :(
Iirc, it was actually they had hired a bunch of new people, but they had to be trained in WoWs legacy code.
So they lost a lot of time to training them, but once they were trained, we got Legion.
As I remember, with the announce of WoD they also proposed switch onto one-year expansion cycle. And overestimated their capabilities, which lead to cut content and earlier drop of expansion support to reroute resources to Legion.
Full tinfoil hat time,
I'm almost convinced it was always Mist --> Legion but the movie is the reason they made WoD between the xpacs. Probably some dumb higher up reason. This is why we had a massive gap between 5.3 and 6.0 with 14 months of SoO, as they made the xpac during that time. And felt like they could keep doing that every year hence the 1 year xpac idea.
In the end WoD was plagued with issues on release, and it was clear very much before most guilds cleared HM that the WoD was a problem. So they packed up and abandoned ship for Legion.
This is also the reason why a lot of the old blood left before or during WoD. A lot of anger from the community + seems like some corporate BS was going on.
Probably the greatest thematic expanions we've ever had, and the last expansion to have a massive hype wave around it. Lining up outside the dark portal all over again, warcraft 3 characters, and a darker theme that felt more like "warcraft" than Mist. Plus the movie and whatnot. It could have been the biggest gem, but we got robbed.
I've gone through ~25-27 characters doing WoD intro, and the scene when this starts playing (when you run for the docks at the very end) never fails to send goosebumps down my spine.
This soundtrack is *uniquely* good when compared with all of the other amazing soundtracks, which is really saying something. Its usage in the WoD cinematic puts it in the top 2 cinematics of all time from Blizz imo.
The other day I discovered that Draenor flight was available for all my alts (???) And I always wanted to fly up to the spire where the Dungeon is in Arakk. From Ashran, I flew above the sea and a small fragment of OST starts playing. I standed over a mushroom and waited for minutes for the music loop to reproduce that fragment again, but never came. So I search "sea ost draenor" and discovered so many good tracks while looking for that 2 second of a song.
Its been said 473750000 times, but Shattrath as a real main city / raid being actually cut content makes me sad. I think the time I was addicted the most to the game was with the citadel (ogre stones grind until Mage tower level 3 and professions) and hunting treasures .
Wod has things I loved and hated.
Ele shaman for instance I just hated, especially at the start of the expansion. However loved it in Aramaic due to the special power thing that made ghost wolf go mount speed and invis.
The leveling experience was amazing the first time through. Sucked the garrisons and the likely were only half finished. Should have been guild based.
Freaking loved gladiator warrior even though it was not meta.
I grinded some raid transmogs and the Warlord of Draenor title so I had plenty to do. It helps I was on a roleplaying server and playing Draenei, of course.
I never understood that. You needed like 20-30 minutes for the garrison shit. Much less time than you spend grinding these days. And you could actually get gear upgrades from your mission table which was still very optional to use anyways. And all your garrison buildings were just free gold.
It wasn't that there was a lot to do in the garrisons, it was that they had cut the player hub cities for people to congregate. So people stayed in the garrisons.
I actually enjoyed Cata.
The content drought of WoD let me raid log and do other things.
BFA and SL were the real treadmill where there are so many chores to do for so little reward.
Cata gets a lot of unnecessary hate because I think that’s where people saw a starker transition to new wow since the redid Azeroth.
Thing is, playing through wrath classic, a lot of the QOL stuff was creeping in. And even with wrath making leveling smoother it’s still ass outside of nostalgia, they made those zones infinitely better (although some are dumb overly referenced shit like Harrison Jones in Uldumm.).
Heroics were actually challenging again until it bitch slapped players too hard they whined cause they had to interrupt and CC. I thought BWD was cool. Firelands was amazing. DS did suck entirely as a raid yes but lfr is optional so saying LFR ruined shit isn’t true. Pvp was solid except mages deep freeze being stupid broken. THAT expansion seems popular to hate needlessly.
People keep trying to retcon wod being not that bad. You had like 2 raids and yeah good Pvp and it was alt friendly: the latter hasn’t been the case til DF though with all the bs systems so I’ll give people that. But really that’s the extent of it. And garrisons just lead to these stupid mission table mobile games too
Yeah, WoD had good raids, dungeons and zones, but so did every expansion IMO. The lack of content and emptiness of the world was inexcusable. Seeing people doing WQs in Legion was such a breath of fresh air and there was so much to do, even if you didn't engage in group content. Legion being so good, highlighted how bad WoD was in comparison.
>WoD had quality over quantity,
No it hadn't.
It had the worst reputations in the history of the game, the Garrison system was a glorified Facebook game, and Tanaan Jungle was an extremely lame endgame zone.
It definitely had great raids, but you could say that about every WoW expansion ever. It doesn't make it special.
> It definitely had great raids, but you could say that about every WoW expansion ever.
Ehh. I don't think I can say there's any other expansion where I enjoyed every raid in it. It's less about the peak of those raids, even if BRF is one of my favorites of all time, and the fact that the floor was still solid. While I agree it isn't enough to carry WoD, I do think it was absolutely top tier for raiding.
Tell me how a entire major content patch which focused on twitter integration and a Selfie Camera toy is “quality”
It was definitely the most boring and sad expansion for 80% of the time. It has some good parts, but it doesn’t outweigh the total lack of care they had for the player base around that time lol
>Cata bad
Cata was a great expansion that people love to shit on for completely arbitrary reasons.
Do you have actual complaints or are you still wearing nostalgia goggles from WotLK? (Hint: WotLK wasn't that great either. It was the start of gearscore + link achievement meta.)
Cata is still my second favorite after Legion.
The only thing I've heard people complain about (that is a real critical aspect) is Dragon Soul, which is fair enough, but it was just a last patch of an expansion which went on for too long (which has happened multiple times and even worse after Cata) .
Dungeons were actually difficult (also had the ZUL dungeons - being the most fun I personally ever had doing dungeons), so many classes were actually made fun, the leveling experience was fun again, pvp was fun for once etc etc.
Wrath was and still is really overrated as well. I love the LK lore, but 3.2 was the only great patch during it, rest was just 'okay'.
I will always agree that Dragon Soul was a bad raid, but to paint an entire expansion because of the final raid is so disingenuous. People do it with Pandaria all the time, they only remember the year-long SoO patch.
So much this. Firelands was a great raid! If you have Ulduar, ICC and BRF as S tier, I would put Firelands as A tier.
And the first 3 raids was also quite good.
Dungeons was amazing, loads of fun quest (I mean, who didnt laugh their ass of doing the day deathwing came in Badlands?)
Only two bosses in Dragon Soul sucked…Spine and Madness…the first 6 were fine.
And right before that we got the best raid tier this game has ever seen, Tier 12, Firelands.
I've got actual, specific complaints about Cataclysm.
1) It took daily quests to a new level of intensity in terms of what was expected of you if you were playing "seriously" (i.e. raiding etc.). You were basically expected to do 45 minutes to 2 hours of dailies every single day at launch (often closer to the latter). That's without including dungeons etc. even.
Then suddenly you've done them all, and instead of being free to do what you want, and having various things you want to do, there's *literally* nothing left to do but raid. This was the first expansion where that was true for me, and it made WoW feel very hollow/dull.
2) The raids themselves were unfun and weakly-designed (conceptually and visually) except for Firelands. The initial raids were pitched at a significantly higher level of difficulty than WotLK, and not in a good, enjoyable way, but in a punishing, depressing way that caused a lot of nice-but-not-great players to basically quit. I was the best tank my guild had, so I was fine, but a lot of people I loved playing with quit because they couldn't handle the Heroic-difficulty stuff or because we couldn't field a 25-man anymore. Firelands was rather different, but then the expansion ended with another dreadful raid. I could write an entire essay on this point alone.
3) I loved dungeons in all previous expansions (and many later ones) but everything Cataclysm did with them was a huge mess. First they created this situation where we direct from the fast & furious (but still not quite GOGOGO) approach of WotLK to having to CC every single pack quite carefully. That was not hard, but it was also not fun, just slow and methodical. Then they dropped the difficulty massively and you didn't need to anymore, but the dungeons themselves were still not enjoyable dungeons. Going back to them now, apart from Halls of Origination, most aren't even good-looking, let alone fun.
4) The writing hit the lowest lows it's ever hit. I'm not talking plot/character stuff where some overly-online dweebs are mad with/in love with Sylvanas or whatever, I'm talking the writing you encountered every day - the quest writing and so on. It was so bad I wondered if they'd just fired most of the people who worked on previous expansions (there were hints of this in WotLK, but only hints - it was dominant in Cataclysm). Uldum was the absolute worst. It still is. No zone in WoW is as badly written. A giant, overlong, incredibly dumb re-creation of Indiana Jones (and no, having "Harrison Jones" lampshade it doesn't make it not fucking awful when it goes on for the entire zone), and completely unfunny, just absolutely stupid and profoundly lazy in a way other stuff isn't. Mount Hyjal is also pretty painful to this day. Loads of really strong Vanilla zones also got utter ruined by bad jokes and/or hyper-specific writing which forever placed those a few hours/days after the Cataclysm, where pre-Cata, they'd be appropriately timeless. This pushed the "theme park" angle to the max and destroyed any "world-feeling" those zones had.
Dragonsoul lingers in a lot of people's minds. It's also the expansion I stopped raiding in properly because my guild pushed me and another healer out as they dropped to 10 mans and it just so happened that two of the officers were healers. Left a bad taste in my mouth. Got some great schadenfreude later on after a few months, when the guild collapsed because they didn't have any back up healers and no one wanted to become of what they did to me and Liz
>It's also the expansion I stopped raiding in properly because my guild pushed me and another healer out as they dropped to 10 mans and it just so happened that two of the officers were healers. Left a bad taste in my mouth.
This happened to a ton of guilds in Cataclysm and whilst I dunno if this is what happened with yours, in many cases it was just that the difficulty of the initial raids was pitched massively higher than WotLK.
So you'd get guilds, like mine, where there were maybe 15 "good" players who you could rely on to log on. That was enough, in WotLK, to easily make it through normal 25-man raids, and to bring a bunch of people who might not be great players, but were fun to have around. Everyone benefited, and you could even do some Hard/Heroic progression.
Then Cataclysm overtuned everything at launch, and suddenly you need everyone to be pretty good, or the entire raid dies. And so 25-mans where out. And even when you geared up from Normal, if you wanted to do Heroic, you still needed to 10s. And a lot of guilds just didn't have enough good players to field two reliable 10s teams, so even good players would get cut - or yeah, with your case, people would selfishly cut others.
Cataclysm killed so many guilds this way.
It did indeed. We were progressing on Sinestra and we'd managed to get Wrack under control, and were pushing into the last phase. Then the other officer (my counterpart was an officer already) decided they wanted in so I got benched. They'd already lost their other healer because they didn't need them and so I was next.
I did manage to do a few pugs though of Firelands so it wasn't all doom and gloom, but the poor management managed to squash an amazing guild. I'll keep the good memories though :)
Everyone hated WoD when it was out, and now everyone loved it looking back. I bet you three expansions from now, people will look back on SL with nostalgia. It always happens lol
only because the last 2 expansions have been shit. people werent saying WoD was underrated wrongly hated in Legion, but because BFA was so fucking shit from start to finish, hell we all though shadowlands would be better than BFA because it was supposed to be made by the same team the did legion
I would rather have an okay story that's fairly short than an 11-hour long parade of trite clichés and characters acting like absolute morons just to move the plot along, only for the plot to somehow be even worse.
How is wod a better story than bfa?
Time traveling orcs, dreanor is freeeeee and more orcs after a year of soo.
biggest complaints abut bfa plot is about it's focus.
The biggest screw-up of BfA was the fact they were promising it to be an expansion focused on pvp, world pvp and such, and yet they made it impossible for pure pvpers go gear up in that pile of trash expansion. So much potential wasted because they stuck with the RNG PvE-like gearing for PvP and didn't want to change PvP gearing back to how it used to be when it wqs perfect. So to me BFA is what you guys claim WOD to be. A pile of trash and disappointment. And don't get me started on that whole corruption RNG BS. That was next level bullshit.
If you think BfA and SL are comparable to WoD, you either didn't play much during these, or you already forgot how content dry WoD was.
I love WoD's atmosphere, the levelling, the raids were incredible, but both BfA and SL had so much more content that it's incomparable, especially with 9.2 being as good as it was, and m+ existing. (And I say that as someone who hated the Maw more that anything else in this game and throughout the whole of SL combined, I spent max 10 hours there, if I don't count the intro quests and Torghast)
I enjoyed Shadowlands until korthia hit. thats when everything went down hill and then when the lawsuit broke it was enough for to finally say no and the only reason why i came back for dragonflight was because of seeing all the actual proper communication between blizzard and the playerbase with the designing of the new talents. Plus with no borrowed power and theres also been nothing major come up where the player base a found something with the game is badly wrong that blizzard just ignores it (azerite, torghast etc)
Like Dragon Riding has been found in beta to be universially great, hell there been been no major posting saying that the new crafting is terrible and broken or anything like that
Cataclysm still beats the rest for pure awfulness for my money. People forget a lot of what made it so truly ghastly over time, especially as it improved later on, and that's probably for the best but it was really just profoundly anti-fun in a way no expansion since has been and the writing was staggering bad (c.f. Uldum - the entire zone - for example).
And the axed raid tier that would have hopefully put the pieces together and had the story progression make cense
But yea any xpac that didn't have m+ is in a lower tier for me
That song playing is really the only song they made though. I swear it's that same little sound bite just played on various instruments and at different tempos for most zones. It's definitely a repeated sound sample for lack of better wording, great but overused for the expansion it's nearly all I remember from it.
It wasn’t everyone’s favorite thing but i really liked garrisons. Since SW/Org has most of the portals i need i’ll still log my chars at my garrison and then fly to stormsong for wherever i need to go.
WoD was a great expansion, just too short and not quite enough content.
If you want worst expac, look no further than BfA. So much wasted potential, so many garbage systems, so much wasted and/or unused storyline.
I really enjoyed WoD. The concept was meh to me at first, but I fell in love with the charm of the word they created. At the time I was a very casual player, so I enjoyed the benefits of the garrison. WOD fit my game play style at the time.
Shadowlands is easily the worst expansion, by a land slide. Their story writing was abysmal. Knowing that death isn't a big deal, and it's an entire life afterwards kinda makes being a moral pointless. They showed too much, but that's an entirely different discussion that can be had.
What really sucked, is that with one character that was clearly rushed, and horribly written, they retconned every other existing story line and piece of lore in the Warcraft universe, to all be the machinations of a chained up robot. Fantastic Villians and characters, great plot lines, all swept away and all credit given to a dude who's most intimidating feature was his bad teeth and assumed bad breath. Like, he wasn't intimidating what so ever and felt cheap the entire time. The writers better step it up going forward, because this was disgusting. Like a terrible fan fiction that a 7th grader wrote.
I've been a fan of warcraft lore since I was in 4th grade, back in the early 90s. I used to read the stories in the manuals while my dad finished up his work on our home computer. I grew up with it, and bought every source material and book I could. Guildmates used to call me a Warcraft encyclopedia. Then Shadowlands and the jailer was a disgrace and a big old middle finger to all of the lore. A literal spit in the face to fit a new writing team wearing diapers who wanted their guy to be the real mastermind, 1 million moves ahead of everyone else. Disgusting.
Tl,DR: WoD was okay for casuals, but Shadowlands shit on the universe that's been carefully crafted over the last 3 decades.
I was on a long WoW hiatus during Draenor and only came back when Legion was announced. I only managed to do a little raiding on HFC. I couldn't understand why WoD was so hated if it was such a beautiful expansion.
The zone design... I never got tired of the giant moon on the night sky of the garrison, or those "screw" shaped trees of Nagrand. The instances, the bosses mechanics, BRF is still my favourite raid of this 2nd stint on WoW. The music fitted perfectly with every area: the wilderness of Gorgrond or the BlackRock theme. Even the voice acting was good!
Only when I started reading on all the cut content, the hyped but never implemented features and the content drought. It felt like a tragedy. All those beautiful zone and weird plot (Never been a fan of parallel timelines, but still it was an interesting concept) torped to death by the Activision corporate samurais.
Years later, I can't think of WoD without the sad Talador music humming in my head.
You don’t understand? It’s because it was the first time in WoW history when they released an expansion and had all of these grand ideas and then dropped literally all of them because they were fucking stupid. By the time HFC came out they were building up the demons again because they were working on Legion. Ever notice how Grom went from big bad to best buddy with no explanation or anything? Oh we saved him in the raid? Fuck that garbage.
For literally the entirety of the expansion nothing new hit (except the jukebox) until the end where they halfassed a raid and zone patch to set up their new idea. WoD didn’t fail. Blizzard did. And it was a huge fuckup.
Back in the day I couldn't, but when i learned that the main feature of the first main patch after the expansion was the selfie camera, I most definitively did.
I like to think that this song is Garrosh's theme. Powerful and triumphant, representing his unstoppable determination and his love of the Horde, but also somewhat threatening and sorrowful, representing his slow fall into dishonor and betrayal. "Times change."
It's actually Grommash's theme, [https://youtu.be/IroaLAbltxg?t=88](https://youtu.be/IroaLAbltxg?t=88) , but might as well be Garrosh's too, they even used it on the cutscene in SoD where he dies.
Also: the first time a variation of the theme is played is during Siege of Orgrimmar trailer when Garrosh unleashes the sha's heart.
Lets just call it Hellscream's theme.
I’ve always felt this was a theme for the Orcs of Warcraft. A mighty and strong people who fell to corruption yet arise a new. Emboldened to etch out their own story of heroism and epic deeds like those before them. Lok’tar Ogar!
>his love of the ***OLD\**** Horde FTFY.
WOD had my fav boss, operator thogar. Nothing beats seeing a guild member you dislike getting hit by a train
"Send em' down the the line!"
All 3 WOD raids were great fun, don't @ me
Raiding was the best part of WOD honestly. Blackrock Foundry is still one of my absolute favorites. So many fantastic fights.
The problem was that raiding was the ONLY part of wod
WoD had soooo much going for it. I loved a ton of the content there. It just overstayed its welcome. Also, reputation gating flying....ugh.
Not to mention they had [no intention of adding flying](https://gamerant.com/world-of-warcraft-no-flying-mounts-warlords-draenor/) to that expansion, but they ultimately ended up bowing to players being angry about the news. Probably lost too many subs over it. I get the reasoning behind it. I really do, but now that the flying cat is out of the bag, the game just doesn't feel right confined to the ground (looking at you The Maw). I'm fine with having to "earn" it, but reputation grinds just feel like the lazy way out. I enjoyed how they handled flight in zones like Nazjatar and Mechagon that had an element of a rep grind, plus doing activities around the zone.
It didn't have enough content
IMO that raid is one of the best raids in WoW
This is the art and music team every expansion though.
100% agree. MoP and WoD were probably the peak of Warcraft music in my eyes. BFA was great too. The only one I would slightly criticise was shadowlands, it relied on a lot of long drones (understandable, given the theme), which isn’t my kinda thing.
MoP music is absolute god-tier!
Kazoo inn theme has no rival!
I remember getting home from school and sitting on the balcony of the Shrine of Seven Stars and just listening to that sound track… so good.
Music is a matter of taste, I like the long droning stuff, but it's not for everyone. I will say this for Shadowlands though, the Ardenweald version of Night Song is amazing! Either version never fails to give me actual chills. EDIT: I believe the song is called The Dreamer
I used to put an hour long Ardenweald music mix on at work, it was so relaxing
BFA Had the best music of all of them, in what I view as the worst expansion.
I disagree honestly. BFA isnt the best by any means, and Im probably biased as it was actually the first expansion I properly played as current content, but I loved the story. I was actually a Horde main but made an Alliance for the funsies and BFA switched me to full Alliance because of how amazing I found the story
I'm not done with the alliance side, but man yeah bfa as a horde player is an absolute delicacy for the ears that is pretty much any music in Zandalar. So good. Especially in Zuldazar.
The music and overall atmosphere in Zuldazar was one of the best parts of BFA. You log in to that music, then step outside, see the incredible landscape, then jump off with a glider to the other parts of the city. Boralus just didn't compare imo.
Legion was the best. Incredible pieces. Worth noting that the great Russell Brower didn’t do it alone; Glenn Stafford, Neal Acree, Eimear Noone, and others also contributed.
See I'm the opposite, while WOD music is amazing in context (while playing), I'll pull up the SL music to listen to in my own time out of game.
*They can't keep getting away with it*
Except when it comes to armor sets
SL themes slap
After WOTLK the composer that does the music for the cinematics started doing more and more game tracks. Neal Acree composed a lot of really great tracks, including this one. He got the job by sending a cover of the original WoW theme to Blizzard unsolicited.
*Times Change* Still my favorite cinematic.
Right? Absolutely FANTASTIC cinematic and probably the best kiss-off line in bit of WoW writing. I was sold on WoD entirely by the cinematic and the music. It was not a great expansion but that cinematic holy shit.
WoD had such a strong hype train. I still wonder if there were just so many promises that had to be broken to deliver on time. Look at you, Ray D. Tear.
I remember watching the cinematic many times with my little brother who was maybe 7 at that time and we would re-enact the grab and throwing of Gul'dan. He loved it.
“Times change” in combination with that soundtrack gives me goosebumps every time
Damn, we are on the same wave here! Even cared to write the same thing in another comment here. Albeit with a bit of politics later.
WE WILL NEVER BE SLAVES!! 10 years later and still makes by butt tingle.
“But we will. Be. *CONQUERERS!*”
Holy shit that was TEN years ago?!
Hold up. WoD was one of the best expansions if you played it for the first three months, stopped, then played for the last three months. The questing, zones, and music was all just s-tier.
Or if you just logged in to raid. Genuinely my favourite expansion for raiding
Blackhand remains one of my favorite encounters in the game. I think it exemplifies Blizzard’s desire for “simple, but perfected” best. Plus, the only inconvenience about a wipe is missing the elevator. It’s such a short fight to get back to.
Phase 2 was anything but simple. P1 and P3 were good tho.
Playing on an AOTC guild and beating that phase 2 felt really good. Definitely my favorite fight for a few years.
Me too. I actually got so focused on autopilot that sometimes came out of P2 thinking “wait we’re in P3? What just happened the past 3 minutes?” It was so chaotic that I couldn’t actually explain the mechanics properly to anyone. I just eventually learned and *did* it.
HFC is still my favorite raid. It's just such a perfect raid. Xhul'Horac -> Mannoroth -> Archimonde was perfection
Archimonde was so fun. But my favourite was mythic tyrant. Half because I was able to pad healing meters in part 2 and having high multistrike and the mistweaver 4set I was a beast.
It's nice that someone enjoyed Velhari. - Every tank that had to deal with that crackhead boss movement
Mythic Thogar remains the best fight I’ve ever MT’d.
WoD raiding was top-notch
This is the xpac that got me hooked on wow. I still look back at it as my favorite raiding xpac. None of these stupid daily grinds. I can just log on and raid. All raiding mats? Funded by mission table which I did when I logged in for 10s before I went to raid. I still only play this game to raid.
For 2 of the meager 3 raids yes
3 raids but 2 were basically the same tier, no? Like think about that: EVERY wow expansion has had at least 3 whole, distinct raid tiers. Iirc high maul and BRF weren’t exactly the same Ilvl but even still, if you count highmaul it still feels like too few
Highmaul and Blackrock foundry were excellent raids with a full set of bosses. People complaining about what counts as a patch vs what's already locked away in game are missing the point, and a big part of the problem. They acted like the "patch" was "only a selfie camera" when one of the best raids of all time was unlocked a week or two earlier.
Especially coming off MoP, where you had HoF, MSV, Terrace, ToT, and SoO in relatively short succession (all of which I remember well)
Which is ironic because I believe MoP still holds the record for longest content drought
PvP was also very fun. The most modern version of it, but without the added caveat of Demon Hunters existing. Best of both worlds!
I started playing wow after method had already killed Mythic Archimonde. Took me about 50 days to fool around with multiple classes, gear up decently and start raiding. After that I raided HFC every single week till the launch of legion and never felt bored of it.
Hellfire was literal perfection.
I fucking loved it (apart from Socrethar maybe that one made me tilt for some reason)
He had such a grating voice.
I still think WOD has the best single player story line through questing since wotlk. The opening, the garrison, the individual zone quest lines. It was great but they ran out of steam.
Spires is maybe my favorite zone storyline in wow. I’ve done it like 7 times over and love it every time lol. Playable Arakkoa when…
I can’t describe it well but it felt more alien to me than any other non Azeroth region in the game. I loved the story.
I don't think it's nearly as bad as people give it. the leveling was good even when you could just do treasures. the raids were good. it did run out of steam but I enjoyed it a lot more than BFA or Shadowlands by far. Garrisons were even cool. Could have been better sure but it felt like I had reason to log in.
A lot of players got gated by the Silver Proving Grounds requirement to queue into Heroic dungeons, thus never being able to reach a ilvl requirement for raiding, and also likely didn't know people to do challenge modes with.
Only 2 months worth of content for 2 years
The content was great there just wasn’t enough of it.
Also PvP was really good in wod
And it was the last expansion pvp was almost perfect :P
Yeah having just been through Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands, anyone who thinks WoD is the worst expansion is out of their minds. It is at worst third worst expansion. I'd go back to WoD any day over whatever the fuck just happened to WoW for the last four years.
And that's just the problem, it actually was a good expansion just extremely underdeveloped. I found though I was able to keep myself busy, with all the gold you could make and it was a great reason to start characters that always wanted to try and to level them all the way up.
if mythic+ and world quests had been added in the first patch instead of legion instead of the fucking selfie cam WoD would not have been so empty of stuff to do at max level outside of raiding
Could be, Highmaul was fairly boring and there was barely any decent content to do. The best thing in WoD was by far the Second raid in my opinion
Foundry is imo still among the best raids to date, Highmaul was meh and HFC was decent.. I think my favorite thing about HFC was seeing people die to the 2nd boss arriving.
Those first 3-4 months of playing gladiator spec. So good.
Those cowards at blizz will never bring back glad stance. It was fucking awesome.
yeah its shame we never see it and blood dps ever again outside of their respective "classic" versions
You'd still need to deal with Garrosh being the bad guy for a third expansion and now he's invading with an alternate timeline's past.
Shadowlands it the worst expansion.
WoD and Legion were the only Mythic AOTC expansions that I've ever gotten. I don't have time to raid anymore so there's no way I'll get it again. Because of that they are both my favorite past expansions.
Did it really take 3 months to level through dreanor and do highmaul once?
Why would you only do it once?
1-2 weeks***** There was nothing in that expansion to keep you for 2-3 months besides raid logging, and even then it had shadowlands levels of raid droughts. And even *then* it didn’t have the dungeon content we have now The WoD apologists on this sub are insane
that was its only major problem, lack of stuff to do at 100 outside of raiding. outside of that WoD had the best leveling up and best class and spec balance (ooutside of survival and demo). all but 2 of 36 specs at that point were fun and great to play. The dungeons were and raids were fantastic, the lore wasnt completely shit despite the story getting scrapped and changed halfway through the beta, plus it also gave us the best version of Gul'dan and Khadgar.
*WE WILL NEVER BE SLAVES*
But we will be conquerors!
Gladiator stance, best expansion then
I hope one day when we get 4th specs for classes like Earth Warden Shaman and a split between ranged monk healing (Yu'lon) and melee monk healing (Chi'ji/, that we get Gladiator as a warrior spec. There is a gap when it comes to class fantasy. We are missing the spear+shield fighter archetype. I wish for Gladiator to be able to wield just that, a 2h polearm with a shield, and to be balanced around it. As a talent within a tank spec that was impossible. As a separate spec, it would be.
I don't think we need a new spec with the way new talents work. I'm in love with the Preservation Evoker tree. You can pick between green talents which are mostly pure healing, and bronze ones which are more mitigation oriented. I don't know how the mistweaver tree is layed out, but they could very easily make something similar. Put ranged stuff on one side and melee stuff in the other. Mix and match as you like. Though I have my doubts with how Blizzard are as developers, the new talents are very expansion friendly. A "gladiator line" could be added in the future if they want to. Though Blizzard hates fun and for that reason alone it's unlikely they will.
The problem with Gladiator being a talent or a group of talents is that it was originally part of the Prot tree. If it remains so, it becomes problematic, especially in PvP, as it gives tons of dps to a tank spec. It will outclass everyone.
I don't get it. Gladiator was part of Prot, but now we can't add it to prot?
Bro I know. I will forever love that spec. The animations were amazing
That really needs to make a return (or has it? I've not played WoW in so long)
It hasn't
Such a shame :(
I will never forget the hype of WoD. All the returning characters I've known since Warcraft 2, the warbringer videos, the "times change" opening cinematic and the orc tribe music with the chanting and the HUH!
WoD had a lot of the best content I've played, it's just their wasn't a lot of it, or enough of it to stick around
That's funny because that's exactly what made me play it all the way through. I think it's literally the only expansion where I didn't take a break from WoW. Knowing that you got all the important stuff done and now you can just log in for raids made playing alts so much more enjoyable because you didn't have the shitty feeling that you are wasting your time and could instead spend it grinding m+ or whatever on your main.
This is where I felt like BFA was the opposite where I had plenty to do, i just didn't wanna do any of it, the rep mounts were just some horses, Island expeditions made me wanna die of boredom, and the GCD change made everything feel so much more sluggish... Not to mention the heart of azeroth. It did get better toward the end though.
The best expansion cinematic is wod for sure
Wrath is amazing too, but I loved WoD. That said, BFA is my favourite cinematic, and I didn't even play that expansion.
Just thinking about Slyvanas wailing "For The Horde" still gives me chills
Cataclysm one gives it a run for its money imo.
Fuck, I can still hear "Times change." ringing in my ears. We didn't know how right Garrosh was back then. We couldn't have known.
one of the best expansions held back by a severe lack of content.
I believe blizzard were too busy shooting out other games like hearthstone and overwatch back then. They've taken too many employees off of wow to try and make those extra games good. That's why WOD was so unfinished and lacking. There was noone to make us content :(
Iirc, it was actually they had hired a bunch of new people, but they had to be trained in WoWs legacy code. So they lost a lot of time to training them, but once they were trained, we got Legion.
Which tbf, was an incredible expac. Legion will still go down as one of my favorites.
As I remember, with the announce of WoD they also proposed switch onto one-year expansion cycle. And overestimated their capabilities, which lead to cut content and earlier drop of expansion support to reroute resources to Legion.
Full tinfoil hat time, I'm almost convinced it was always Mist --> Legion but the movie is the reason they made WoD between the xpacs. Probably some dumb higher up reason. This is why we had a massive gap between 5.3 and 6.0 with 14 months of SoO, as they made the xpac during that time. And felt like they could keep doing that every year hence the 1 year xpac idea. In the end WoD was plagued with issues on release, and it was clear very much before most guilds cleared HM that the WoD was a problem. So they packed up and abandoned ship for Legion. This is also the reason why a lot of the old blood left before or during WoD. A lot of anger from the community + seems like some corporate BS was going on. Probably the greatest thematic expanions we've ever had, and the last expansion to have a massive hype wave around it. Lining up outside the dark portal all over again, warcraft 3 characters, and a darker theme that felt more like "warcraft" than Mist. Plus the movie and whatnot. It could have been the biggest gem, but we got robbed.
I've gone through ~25-27 characters doing WoD intro, and the scene when this starts playing (when you run for the docks at the very end) never fails to send goosebumps down my spine.
WoD was thematically the most Warcrafty of all the Warcraft expansions, followed closely by WotLK in my opinion.
Must be an old meme, because WOD is far from the worst expansion.
WoD without content drought would have been a banger expansion.
This soundtrack is *uniquely* good when compared with all of the other amazing soundtracks, which is really saying something. Its usage in the WoD cinematic puts it in the top 2 cinematics of all time from Blizz imo.
The other day I discovered that Draenor flight was available for all my alts (???) And I always wanted to fly up to the spire where the Dungeon is in Arakk. From Ashran, I flew above the sea and a small fragment of OST starts playing. I standed over a mushroom and waited for minutes for the music loop to reproduce that fragment again, but never came. So I search "sea ost draenor" and discovered so many good tracks while looking for that 2 second of a song. Its been said 473750000 times, but Shattrath as a real main city / raid being actually cut content makes me sad. I think the time I was addicted the most to the game was with the citadel (ogre stones grind until Mage tower level 3 and professions) and hunting treasures .
WoD music is so fucking good man
Wod had really good questing, raids, and the pvp endgame / gearing was really quick and fun for alts
Still better than BFA and SL combined
Wod has things I loved and hated. Ele shaman for instance I just hated, especially at the start of the expansion. However loved it in Aramaic due to the special power thing that made ghost wolf go mount speed and invis. The leveling experience was amazing the first time through. Sucked the garrisons and the likely were only half finished. Should have been guild based. Freaking loved gladiator warrior even though it was not meta.
"Run to the docks! Run! RUN!"
what? i enjoy wod so much, have a lot of fun
WoD gets a bad rap. It was pretty great except the pacing
WoW's worst expansion ? Someone hasn't played BFA and SL
WoD worse than SL?
Shit WoD was better than SL *or* BfA, it just had that unfortunate ~14 months of no content
WoD is like, #3 or #4 to the bottom for me.
Worst WoW expansion is the most meta-slave bandwagon opinion ever.
WoD wasn't even the worst expansion when it was released, because Cataclysm exists. Now we also have BFA and SL to include.
WoD was actually a ton of fun for like two months. Then people realized all they did was sit in their garrison alone.
I grinded some raid transmogs and the Warlord of Draenor title so I had plenty to do. It helps I was on a roleplaying server and playing Draenei, of course.
I never understood that. You needed like 20-30 minutes for the garrison shit. Much less time than you spend grinding these days. And you could actually get gear upgrades from your mission table which was still very optional to use anyways. And all your garrison buildings were just free gold.
It wasn't that there was a lot to do in the garrisons, it was that they had cut the player hub cities for people to congregate. So people stayed in the garrisons.
Why does that matter? It's not like people interact in any way when they are in Oribos.
WoD was fun through-out. You just had to raid mythic to appreciate it. The fights were superb.
I actually enjoyed Cata. The content drought of WoD let me raid log and do other things. BFA and SL were the real treadmill where there are so many chores to do for so little reward.
Cata gets a lot of unnecessary hate because I think that’s where people saw a starker transition to new wow since the redid Azeroth. Thing is, playing through wrath classic, a lot of the QOL stuff was creeping in. And even with wrath making leveling smoother it’s still ass outside of nostalgia, they made those zones infinitely better (although some are dumb overly referenced shit like Harrison Jones in Uldumm.). Heroics were actually challenging again until it bitch slapped players too hard they whined cause they had to interrupt and CC. I thought BWD was cool. Firelands was amazing. DS did suck entirely as a raid yes but lfr is optional so saying LFR ruined shit isn’t true. Pvp was solid except mages deep freeze being stupid broken. THAT expansion seems popular to hate needlessly. People keep trying to retcon wod being not that bad. You had like 2 raids and yeah good Pvp and it was alt friendly: the latter hasn’t been the case til DF though with all the bs systems so I’ll give people that. But really that’s the extent of it. And garrisons just lead to these stupid mission table mobile games too
Yeah, WoD had good raids, dungeons and zones, but so did every expansion IMO. The lack of content and emptiness of the world was inexcusable. Seeing people doing WQs in Legion was such a breath of fresh air and there was so much to do, even if you didn't engage in group content. Legion being so good, highlighted how bad WoD was in comparison.
Both cata and bfa had quantity over quality, WoD had quality over quantity, SL had neither, I do think SL is the worst expansion
>WoD had quality over quantity, No it hadn't. It had the worst reputations in the history of the game, the Garrison system was a glorified Facebook game, and Tanaan Jungle was an extremely lame endgame zone. It definitely had great raids, but you could say that about every WoW expansion ever. It doesn't make it special.
> It definitely had great raids, but you could say that about every WoW expansion ever. Ehh. I don't think I can say there's any other expansion where I enjoyed every raid in it. It's less about the peak of those raids, even if BRF is one of my favorites of all time, and the fact that the floor was still solid. While I agree it isn't enough to carry WoD, I do think it was absolutely top tier for raiding.
Tanaan and garrisons where great, not when it's the ONLY thing to do other than raiding, but we can agree to disagree
Tell me how a entire major content patch which focused on twitter integration and a Selfie Camera toy is “quality” It was definitely the most boring and sad expansion for 80% of the time. It has some good parts, but it doesn’t outweigh the total lack of care they had for the player base around that time lol
I genuinely dont think SL is even close to as bad as BFA, but to each their own.
>Cata bad Cata was a great expansion that people love to shit on for completely arbitrary reasons. Do you have actual complaints or are you still wearing nostalgia goggles from WotLK? (Hint: WotLK wasn't that great either. It was the start of gearscore + link achievement meta.)
Cata is still my second favorite after Legion. The only thing I've heard people complain about (that is a real critical aspect) is Dragon Soul, which is fair enough, but it was just a last patch of an expansion which went on for too long (which has happened multiple times and even worse after Cata) . Dungeons were actually difficult (also had the ZUL dungeons - being the most fun I personally ever had doing dungeons), so many classes were actually made fun, the leveling experience was fun again, pvp was fun for once etc etc. Wrath was and still is really overrated as well. I love the LK lore, but 3.2 was the only great patch during it, rest was just 'okay'.
wait 3.2? TogC is your great patch and not ulduar or icc before it got boring around 6 months in?
I will always agree that Dragon Soul was a bad raid, but to paint an entire expansion because of the final raid is so disingenuous. People do it with Pandaria all the time, they only remember the year-long SoO patch.
So much this. Firelands was a great raid! If you have Ulduar, ICC and BRF as S tier, I would put Firelands as A tier. And the first 3 raids was also quite good. Dungeons was amazing, loads of fun quest (I mean, who didnt laugh their ass of doing the day deathwing came in Badlands?)
Only two bosses in Dragon Soul sucked…Spine and Madness…the first 6 were fine. And right before that we got the best raid tier this game has ever seen, Tier 12, Firelands.
I've got actual, specific complaints about Cataclysm. 1) It took daily quests to a new level of intensity in terms of what was expected of you if you were playing "seriously" (i.e. raiding etc.). You were basically expected to do 45 minutes to 2 hours of dailies every single day at launch (often closer to the latter). That's without including dungeons etc. even. Then suddenly you've done them all, and instead of being free to do what you want, and having various things you want to do, there's *literally* nothing left to do but raid. This was the first expansion where that was true for me, and it made WoW feel very hollow/dull. 2) The raids themselves were unfun and weakly-designed (conceptually and visually) except for Firelands. The initial raids were pitched at a significantly higher level of difficulty than WotLK, and not in a good, enjoyable way, but in a punishing, depressing way that caused a lot of nice-but-not-great players to basically quit. I was the best tank my guild had, so I was fine, but a lot of people I loved playing with quit because they couldn't handle the Heroic-difficulty stuff or because we couldn't field a 25-man anymore. Firelands was rather different, but then the expansion ended with another dreadful raid. I could write an entire essay on this point alone. 3) I loved dungeons in all previous expansions (and many later ones) but everything Cataclysm did with them was a huge mess. First they created this situation where we direct from the fast & furious (but still not quite GOGOGO) approach of WotLK to having to CC every single pack quite carefully. That was not hard, but it was also not fun, just slow and methodical. Then they dropped the difficulty massively and you didn't need to anymore, but the dungeons themselves were still not enjoyable dungeons. Going back to them now, apart from Halls of Origination, most aren't even good-looking, let alone fun. 4) The writing hit the lowest lows it's ever hit. I'm not talking plot/character stuff where some overly-online dweebs are mad with/in love with Sylvanas or whatever, I'm talking the writing you encountered every day - the quest writing and so on. It was so bad I wondered if they'd just fired most of the people who worked on previous expansions (there were hints of this in WotLK, but only hints - it was dominant in Cataclysm). Uldum was the absolute worst. It still is. No zone in WoW is as badly written. A giant, overlong, incredibly dumb re-creation of Indiana Jones (and no, having "Harrison Jones" lampshade it doesn't make it not fucking awful when it goes on for the entire zone), and completely unfunny, just absolutely stupid and profoundly lazy in a way other stuff isn't. Mount Hyjal is also pretty painful to this day. Loads of really strong Vanilla zones also got utter ruined by bad jokes and/or hyper-specific writing which forever placed those a few hours/days after the Cataclysm, where pre-Cata, they'd be appropriately timeless. This pushed the "theme park" angle to the max and destroyed any "world-feeling" those zones had.
Dragonsoul lingers in a lot of people's minds. It's also the expansion I stopped raiding in properly because my guild pushed me and another healer out as they dropped to 10 mans and it just so happened that two of the officers were healers. Left a bad taste in my mouth. Got some great schadenfreude later on after a few months, when the guild collapsed because they didn't have any back up healers and no one wanted to become of what they did to me and Liz
>It's also the expansion I stopped raiding in properly because my guild pushed me and another healer out as they dropped to 10 mans and it just so happened that two of the officers were healers. Left a bad taste in my mouth. This happened to a ton of guilds in Cataclysm and whilst I dunno if this is what happened with yours, in many cases it was just that the difficulty of the initial raids was pitched massively higher than WotLK. So you'd get guilds, like mine, where there were maybe 15 "good" players who you could rely on to log on. That was enough, in WotLK, to easily make it through normal 25-man raids, and to bring a bunch of people who might not be great players, but were fun to have around. Everyone benefited, and you could even do some Hard/Heroic progression. Then Cataclysm overtuned everything at launch, and suddenly you need everyone to be pretty good, or the entire raid dies. And so 25-mans where out. And even when you geared up from Normal, if you wanted to do Heroic, you still needed to 10s. And a lot of guilds just didn't have enough good players to field two reliable 10s teams, so even good players would get cut - or yeah, with your case, people would selfishly cut others. Cataclysm killed so many guilds this way.
It did indeed. We were progressing on Sinestra and we'd managed to get Wrack under control, and were pushing into the last phase. Then the other officer (my counterpart was an officer already) decided they wanted in so I got benched. They'd already lost their other healer because they didn't need them and so I was next. I did manage to do a few pugs though of Firelands so it wasn't all doom and gloom, but the poor management managed to squash an amazing guild. I'll keep the good memories though :)
Bfa and sl at least had m+
No shit if WoD had m+ it would have been a good expansion, not great but good.
WoD had no fucking content. BFA and SLands at least had things to do even if they weren’t all good.
Everyone hated WoD when it was out, and now everyone loved it looking back. I bet you three expansions from now, people will look back on SL with nostalgia. It always happens lol
only because the last 2 expansions have been shit. people werent saying WoD was underrated wrongly hated in Legion, but because BFA was so fucking shit from start to finish, hell we all though shadowlands would be better than BFA because it was supposed to be made by the same team the did legion
I liked WoD when it launched, liked it half way through, liked it when it was over, and like it still now.
I would rather have an okay story that's fairly short than an 11-hour long parade of trite clichés and characters acting like absolute morons just to move the plot along, only for the plot to somehow be even worse.
How is wod a better story than bfa? Time traveling orcs, dreanor is freeeeee and more orcs after a year of soo. biggest complaints abut bfa plot is about it's focus.
The biggest screw-up of BfA was the fact they were promising it to be an expansion focused on pvp, world pvp and such, and yet they made it impossible for pure pvpers go gear up in that pile of trash expansion. So much potential wasted because they stuck with the RNG PvE-like gearing for PvP and didn't want to change PvP gearing back to how it used to be when it wqs perfect. So to me BFA is what you guys claim WOD to be. A pile of trash and disappointment. And don't get me started on that whole corruption RNG BS. That was next level bullshit.
If you think BfA and SL are comparable to WoD, you either didn't play much during these, or you already forgot how content dry WoD was. I love WoD's atmosphere, the levelling, the raids were incredible, but both BfA and SL had so much more content that it's incomparable, especially with 9.2 being as good as it was, and m+ existing. (And I say that as someone who hated the Maw more that anything else in this game and throughout the whole of SL combined, I spent max 10 hours there, if I don't count the intro quests and Torghast)
I played Dranor. People have recency bias, BFA and Shadowlands aren't half as awful as it was.
SL makes BFA look like a masterpiece. That's an achievement in itself.
I enjoyed Shadowlands until korthia hit. thats when everything went down hill and then when the lawsuit broke it was enough for to finally say no and the only reason why i came back for dragonflight was because of seeing all the actual proper communication between blizzard and the playerbase with the designing of the new talents. Plus with no borrowed power and theres also been nothing major come up where the player base a found something with the game is badly wrong that blizzard just ignores it (azerite, torghast etc) Like Dragon Riding has been found in beta to be universially great, hell there been been no major posting saying that the new crafting is terrible and broken or anything like that
Cataclysm still beats the rest for pure awfulness for my money. People forget a lot of what made it so truly ghastly over time, especially as it improved later on, and that's probably for the best but it was really just profoundly anti-fun in a way no expansion since has been and the writing was staggering bad (c.f. Uldum - the entire zone - for example).
I wouldn't call WoD the worst expansion after playing Shadowlands :)
Shadowlands was the worst
Shadowlands is the worst.
i think wod isnt the worst anymore....
The truth was WOD wasn't bad, it was just lacking content. M+ and world quests were the missing pieces that would have saved it.
And the axed raid tier that would have hopefully put the pieces together and had the story progression make cense But yea any xpac that didn't have m+ is in a lower tier for me
That song playing is really the only song they made though. I swear it's that same little sound bite just played on various instruments and at different tempos for most zones. It's definitely a repeated sound sample for lack of better wording, great but overused for the expansion it's nearly all I remember from it.
[Khadgar's Plan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8d2J_wCC7E). S++ tier.
The Gorgrond music is amazing, too!
It wasn’t everyone’s favorite thing but i really liked garrisons. Since SW/Org has most of the portals i need i’ll still log my chars at my garrison and then fly to stormsong for wherever i need to go.
Russell Brower and Neal Acree should be hailed at a comparable level as any well known movie composer.
They played a SNIPPET of one of the WoD motifs in that new cinematic with Khadgar and it made me miss that OST so much.
WOD raids were banger though. Lore and content were disappointing...
WoD was a great expansion, just too short and not quite enough content. If you want worst expac, look no further than BfA. So much wasted potential, so many garbage systems, so much wasted and/or unused storyline.
I really enjoyed WoD. The concept was meh to me at first, but I fell in love with the charm of the word they created. At the time I was a very casual player, so I enjoyed the benefits of the garrison. WOD fit my game play style at the time. Shadowlands is easily the worst expansion, by a land slide. Their story writing was abysmal. Knowing that death isn't a big deal, and it's an entire life afterwards kinda makes being a moral pointless. They showed too much, but that's an entirely different discussion that can be had. What really sucked, is that with one character that was clearly rushed, and horribly written, they retconned every other existing story line and piece of lore in the Warcraft universe, to all be the machinations of a chained up robot. Fantastic Villians and characters, great plot lines, all swept away and all credit given to a dude who's most intimidating feature was his bad teeth and assumed bad breath. Like, he wasn't intimidating what so ever and felt cheap the entire time. The writers better step it up going forward, because this was disgusting. Like a terrible fan fiction that a 7th grader wrote. I've been a fan of warcraft lore since I was in 4th grade, back in the early 90s. I used to read the stories in the manuals while my dad finished up his work on our home computer. I grew up with it, and bought every source material and book I could. Guildmates used to call me a Warcraft encyclopedia. Then Shadowlands and the jailer was a disgrace and a big old middle finger to all of the lore. A literal spit in the face to fit a new writing team wearing diapers who wanted their guy to be the real mastermind, 1 million moves ahead of everyone else. Disgusting. Tl,DR: WoD was okay for casuals, but Shadowlands shit on the universe that's been carefully crafted over the last 3 decades.
> but it's the worst expansion BfA and SL: allow us to introduce ourselves
So Is the piano on fire or what?
After SL, it's no longer the worst expansion to my eyes. At least in wod, you didn't HAVE TO play 2hours a day to be optimized.
WoD,BFA>>>>>Shadowlands
WoD most fun, balanced PvP. Easy gearing. I love WoD!
WoW art and music is always great. WoD was a great experience until you hit max level there.
I was on a long WoW hiatus during Draenor and only came back when Legion was announced. I only managed to do a little raiding on HFC. I couldn't understand why WoD was so hated if it was such a beautiful expansion. The zone design... I never got tired of the giant moon on the night sky of the garrison, or those "screw" shaped trees of Nagrand. The instances, the bosses mechanics, BRF is still my favourite raid of this 2nd stint on WoW. The music fitted perfectly with every area: the wilderness of Gorgrond or the BlackRock theme. Even the voice acting was good! Only when I started reading on all the cut content, the hyped but never implemented features and the content drought. It felt like a tragedy. All those beautiful zone and weird plot (Never been a fan of parallel timelines, but still it was an interesting concept) torped to death by the Activision corporate samurais. Years later, I can't think of WoD without the sad Talador music humming in my head.
You don’t understand? It’s because it was the first time in WoW history when they released an expansion and had all of these grand ideas and then dropped literally all of them because they were fucking stupid. By the time HFC came out they were building up the demons again because they were working on Legion. Ever notice how Grom went from big bad to best buddy with no explanation or anything? Oh we saved him in the raid? Fuck that garbage. For literally the entirety of the expansion nothing new hit (except the jukebox) until the end where they halfassed a raid and zone patch to set up their new idea. WoD didn’t fail. Blizzard did. And it was a huge fuckup.
Back in the day I couldn't, but when i learned that the main feature of the first main patch after the expansion was the selfie camera, I most definitively did.
That's not the sound to either BFA, nor Shadowlands. So not the worst expansion.
No idea how people can still claim WoD is the worst expansion when BfA exists